Restoring your system from a Linux based remote Time Machine backup

In a previous post I explained that I configured my Debian GNU/Linux server to act as a Time Machine server.

The purpose of Time Machine is to backup your Mac and to allow you to retrieve some files you deleted or to restore your system. Last week my MacBook's hard drive suddenly died without a warning. Since I was moving in my new apartment, the last backup was few days before, but at least I had a quite recent backup.

The question was: does Time Machine will allow me to restore my backup as expected?

I bought a new hard drive, plugged it, boot on Mac OS X install DVD, selected Utilities/Restore system from backup… then nothing. No backup listed and the "Connect to remote disk" is grayed/disabled 😟.

I was a bit disappointed. I launched the terminal and tried to manually mount the remote backup but I failed. This was the good solution, I just didn't know the right command to mount a remote apple volume. After googling a bit (thanks to my iPhone) I found the right instructions:

• Create a directory where to mount the remote backup:

  # mkdir /Volumes/backup
  

• Mount remote volume:

  # mount_afp afp://login:password@hostname/volumename /Volumes/backup
  

Then relaunch the "Restore from backup" utility, the remote volume was now listed. Just had to select and start waiting (restoring the system may be quite long).